Dénouement
by crackinthecup
Summary: Moments, fragments: this is a collection of them, in the landslide that is Celebrimbor's life. Silverfisting.


**Warnings:** implied torture and non-con, though nothing graphic; background Angbang is very much present.

 **A/N:** Written as a Christmas gift for curmudgeony on Tumblr.

* * *

The beginning struck a thrill through his bones, a blistering sliver of lightning. Rain would come in its wake, great sheets of water guzzled up by the soil, transmuted into life tender and green, new shoots and new leaves. Celebrimbor did not, _could not_ , forget that sometimes lightning would burn instead, scorching to a ruinous crisp. It was a Maia who spoke words fair and silvered, a Maia hailing from blessed lands beyond the frothing loneliness of seas; and though not a syllable tripped in haste over those chiseled lips, there were many who lent a wary ear to his tales.

Numbered among them was the young herald of Gil-galad. His tone harbored no command; even so Celebrimbor could not lightly discard his warning. Elrond pointed to a whiff of something dark, something rotten—something of a world ancient and buried beneath churning waves; it billowed and breathed deep within the Maia's core. Elrond could feel it scratching down to bone-marrow and deeper still, an affinity glowing through generations from Melian herself. With the slow turn of time Celebrimbor would come to sense it too, when Annatar's lip would twitch with something furious and forcefully restrained. But now his will was devoted to brightness, the tentative hope of a new Age, and premonitions could not yet dismantle his resolve; so courteously he penned a letter bound for Lindon, and Elrond was left to muse over spangles of reassurance.

X X

He would not be led into so readily eschewing caution, Celebrimbor promised himself. Others warned of darkness, yet he rather frowned at the honeyed, cloying aura dripping from Annatar, trickling into the stomach and there brewing sickness. Slowly, subtly, he set his trap (he hoped Annatar would not stumble into it, not now, not ever); sturdy were his memories of Valinor, and as much as he gravitated away from the fenced-in ideology of his grandfather, as much as he deemed paranoia a cul-de-sac, manipulation slumbered in blood and sinew like a half-forgotten childhood tune. _Why come here if Aulë's halls were so auspicious? Whereabouts did you reside? Did you attend the festivals?_

It was smooth, Celebrimbor deemed it, smooth and plying (he _wanted_ to trust Annatar), yet he was no match for the Maia. All his questions would be answered and Celebrimbor could not fault any of Annatar's statements (plucked, gleaned, _twisted_ from minds unsuspecting, from mouths bloodied while beringed fingers grasped at tufts of red hair). The seamlessness of the Maia's rejoinders would render his own memories wobbly, slipping from their lattice, sensations and fragments tottering as in an avalanche: stars bright overhead within a moment of infinity when his mother would pause in her explanations and the hand that had been tracing out constellations would curl around his shoulder; her fingers light against his scalp, deft in their little twisting motions, fitting strands of hair into a braid, and nothing but his voice filling the room as he talked and talked as though a dam had cracked asunder; the heat of the forge billowing over his skin as each hammer-strike lent a paced, ordered cadence to his thoughts.

As in a maelstrom the past was caught and he could not untangle the thread of time. It would have been easier, less bloody and brutal in the end, if he had seen a shadow, a smirk distorting Annatar's lips as his own questions faltered; but the Maia's expression remained civil, and his lips a curve as sedate and handsome as ever.

X X

Annatar was so golden that night. Brightness chipped off him, an aura that had to be continually remade; even then Celebrimbor should have known. But though warmth pulsed beneath his own skin, Annatar's hands were warmer still, always, in chill or rain or the lonely hours of the night when Celebrimbor would find him in the forge, sleepless, haunted (just like him). And as much as Annatar's wine goblet appeared to hover untouched upon the table, mead was so drowsy in his own muscles, it clucked so vehemently at doubts and fears, that Celebrimbor deemed himself a fool for ever admitting them into the counsel of his heart; he was not his grandfather, he was not his father, and of this he was certain: he was least like them when he fumbled in the haze of alcohol and fluttering affection for Annatar's hand and pressed an earnestness he would come to regret against his lips.

He did not notice how Annatar stiffened, unresponsive, too pale for the heat and the wine. Celebrimbor's very scent was wrong. Soil moist and bare, readied for the corpses of the world; ash tickling the back of his throat, coating his skin, padding the inside of his skull—there was nothing of it in the soft brush of Celebrimbor's tongue against his own; nothing of the sting of teeth, or the slicing sharpness of nails down his side. He would always belong to another.

But words were impossible between gasping mouths; there had never been enough words in all the tongues of Arda. So Annatar kissed back, firm, harsh even, something to fill the void where his ribcage had been suctioned empty. If Celebrimbor had said no, batted away bruising hands, things might have been different (it would have been useless, in the end); he told himself, again and again, a repeating loop of thought with each hammer-blow the next day, that it was simply how Annatar was, and that meant it was what he wanted.

X X

They both had nightmares. Stripped down to the barest essentials, the skeleton of facts, they were not so different after all: things lost, a future built upon rubble. The quarrel resided in clutching hands, the pillowing of a dark head upon a naked shoulder.

In the early days Celebrimbor would start out of dreams crackling with fire, dreams shivering within rock-hewn walls, alive with whispers that coiled round the neck like a noose; he would claw himself out of the subterranean reaches of his mind, thrashing even while consciousness was still hazy and fractured. There were no screams; only cold sweat, seeping through the sheets. And slowly, inevitably, as though the mechanism of destruction were spun out of neural circuits, panic would drain from limb and heart, and he would let himself fall into Annatar's warmth.

Celebrimbor had never stopped falling. All too soon words bubbled up his throat from some dark, dank place within his chest; he did not notice quite how keenly Annatar listened, less compassion than razor-sharp attention, a hunger to the tilt of his head. Or perhaps he did, bundling the truth away behind lies all too ready to spring to the tip of the tongue, hiding that bone-rattling reality where he knew he would be too afraid to look for it. Annatar cared, Annatar worried. The furnace-heat radiating from his fingers, splayed so snugly over his skull, did not enfeeble.

In the scant days before the fabric of his world ruptured, before what was supposed to be a short absence turned to war, he would simply curl into Annatar while the ravages of his nightmare still juddered through him. Eyes closed, unseeing as they roved across senseless landscapes behind his eyelids, whimpers muffled into the Maia's chest.

He asked too many questions.

For Annatar too jolted out of the mesh of remembrance and reverie that swirled through his slumber: charred fingers boring into his cheeks, tipping his head back at an impossible angle; reverberations that drummed down into the very roots of the mountains, unearthly wrath splintering the stone, and a kiss that pretended they had all the time in the world (they didn't).

Yet on such occasions, twitching awake to find Celebrimbor half-draped over him, Annatar did not nuzzle into that drowsy embrace. He lay rigid, a motionlessness self-imposed, and stared at the streaks of moonlight cutting across the ceiling. Silver and diaphanous, a gentle radiance drizzling light into the chamber, and for that Annatar abhorred it; for bone-deep echoed the ache, pulsing like a mad little heart, the longing for a time when neither moon nor sun plagued the skies and darkness could still be a place of worship. He longed too for another body beside his own, sets of breaths deep and dark, like a mighty beast upon whose spine the world careened. Celebrimbor puffed his exhalations into that silver light, too soft, barely there, and Annatar wanted to wrench them to an end forever.

He didn't; the plan he would not renounce. He dressed in silence, tunic and loose-fitting trousers, a hindrance in the forge but it did not matter; too well he knew he would be displeased with his work. Soon dawn would blister across the heavens and footsteps would crunch far closer than he could ever want them. Questions asked, solicitude eroding into frustration, and Annatar found it disgustingly easy to match it with scalding vexation of his own.

Celebrimbor could see the halcyon days were over, tumbling into something that scraped like ash over his tongue. Yet he could also see the gilded lie, propped up with scraps of truth, all their work leaching into the benefit of Middle-earth; the setbacks were no concern at all, together they would fashion them into rightness (they had to).

He could have run. He could have had Annatar imprisoned, cast out, Maia though he was; he was still the lord of Eregion and no saccharine words could change that. He didn't; ever the leap of his heart had been against such a choice.

X X

From amidst a sea of pain, a choppy, murky sea that looked precisely the same for miles upon trackless miles, one moment glowered coal-red and hurting—a hurt snaking round the heart even as arrows whined past Celebrimbor's ear, missing their mark.

Upon Annatar's orders the Orc had left: a thin, curved blade clattering to the ground, speckling blood over the flagstones. Each breath was wet and aching in his lungs, a sucking, airless sound as though hands were clamped round his neck. Desperately he needed rest, mind weaving in and out blankness, trembling into frayed alertness as yet another bucket of water was upturned over his head. But Annatar's presence would never have afforded respite on the best of days.

The light of him was obscene in the dark cell; an irregular blackness of skittering shapes and blurring vision, hands so numerous the Elf had lost count, all plucking and twisting, all hurting the same. Celebrimbor could not meet Annatar's gaze: golden as it had always been, an endless, hypnotic incandescence, eye-watering in the dimness of his surrounds. And so earnestly, so pathetically Celebrimbor wished he had imagined the taint there, the blackening blaze, the fitful sparks of vermilion swooping in his irises; horror circled over and over, perennial from the moment he had laid eyes upon him again (a traitorous frolic of the heart, an instinctive thrill he did not know how to muzzle)— _what have you done?_

He expected fingers clawing at his chin, straightening his head, forcing it upward— _there now, such is the proper way for a slave to converse with his betters_. Instead skin brushed against skin, palm cupping his cheek, a cradling caress so sincere that it amplified each hurt; unbidden tears smeared down his grime-plastered cheeks, and even though the threads of reason that had not yet snapped revolted at such weakness, Celebrimbor blindly pressed himself into the touch, for warmth, for comfort, for the mockery of love he had craved throughout the wheeling years. For an Age they might have been stranded there, Annatar shushing him, raking the hair off his brow, mindful of the bruising rings on his fingers.

"It could have been easy," the Maia murmured into the haze that had draped over them, glowing emotion and heartbeat so fierce that Celebrimbor felt his ribcage might burst. The words were so evidently intended for no one other than Annatar himself that Celebrimbor felt drawn into a golden sphere of intimacy, and he longed for nothing more than to pillow his pounding head against Annatar's shoulder and never move again.

''You could have been brilliant,'' Annatar continued, regret and something else thickening his voice; something that no earthly being could have felt so deeply, so mournfully. He was bending over Celebrimbor, into him, as a mother might when tending to an infant sick in the cot. ''Such potential should never go to waste.''

And then it was over, just as suddenly as it had begun: nothing but the clammy air of the cell against his skin, Annatar gliding away with so much ease that Celebrimbor's heart ossified, a weight in the pit of his stomach.

''Wait, I—'' The dread of loss compelled him to speak; but everything had already been said.

 _Please—_

 _Mere information, Tyelperinquar, I need nothing else._

 _I can't – Make it stop—_

 _I will, my sweet, I will; but what help is that to me now, hmm?_

But Annatar turned, expectant, as though on any ordinary day in the forge, Celebrimbor giddily pushing a new alloy into his hands—

Celebrimbor felt that, if only he could assemble the right words, the smooth words, not pleas and garbled shouts and profanities scooped out of churning blackness of heart and spit out like venom—no, the right words, the words that would make Annatar see where he was going wrong, would make him understand that it was not too late to go back and fix everything—

But his throat was too dry, his tongue filled his mouth too strangely.

''Oh, Tyelpë,'' Annatar crooned, and the smoothness was back, the cream-like heaviness of his tone that Celebrimbor knew he must have mastered at the knee of one so malevolent, so noxious, that the earth still writhed with the remnants of his power. ''Go back and fix everything? How charming a concept.'' The barriers erected around his mind were of no more avail here than a sword in broken fingers; the Maia rifling through his thoughts was as much a constant as the perpetual, sea-sick sway of the lamp above his head, set into motion by milling feet far above in a world that went on without him. Yet Annatar had never turned away to leave, Celebrimbor realized, panic nothing but a fangless, squirming thing in his stomach; a gag clinked in jeweled hands, a hollow metal ring glinting between leather straps.

''You can never undo what has been done, Elfling, understand as much. Even now you can shun your father, shun your grandfather: it is in your blood, and though you bleached your veins, the taint would still be there,'' Annatar smirked, cold and cruel, sadism Celebrimbor had seen before but never allowed himself to believe; but then his demeanor mellowed, and he was once more the mentor, the friend, the lover. ''I will ask you one more time, for this is the only way forward, Tyelpë: where are the Three? History need not be repeated.''

Celebrimbor jerked his head in refusal: out of habit, out of the compulsion not to fail, not again; if nothing but a bloodied smear of history would be left to his name, the least he could do was cling to the knowledge that he did the right thing, in the end.

''Very well,'' Annatar conceded with the air of one goaded into a narrow space without alternative. Celebrimbor was too weak to snap his jaw shut against the intrusion of the gag. It would not be so bad, he thought, he would pretend it was naught but a game, a little farce and then Annatar would release him, pat him upon the head for good behavior. Yet even as despair staggered at his pulse point, something empty-eyed and cracking within him longed for the very worst: perhaps then abandoning Annatar to the evil inside him, a rot that sprawled and consumed, would not feel so wrong.

''It is only information that I ask of you. Nothing so very difficult after all, just a handful of sentences and then we could put all this behind us,'' Annatar continued reasonably, canting Celebrimbor's head up by the chin, to preen, to admire. ''If you wish to be recalcitrant, then perhaps that mouth of yours might be better suited to other deployments.''

Yet with a flare of fright Celebrimbor understood it would not be like all the times in his bedchamber, or in Annatar's quarters, or in the forge besides. Out of the corner of his eye, in the hulking shadows beyond the open door, he could descry shapes, forms, jostling and raucous and sickeningly familiar, half-shouting in their harsh, guttural language. For a moment everything sloshed to a standstill, like the dregs at the bottom of a wine glass; for a moment Annatar's fingers slipped over his cheek, up, up, tracing the helix of his ear, moving to cradle the back of his head. But whatever tender, airy thing had floated between them had been slashed to tatters. Celebrimbor tilted his chin, saliva dribbling down his torso, and Annatar stared at anything that wasn't him.

''I had hoped you would not make me do this to you,'' he confessed, and Celebrimbor knew he should have stopped heeding his words long ago; he knew as much, yet still, within its cage of bruised ribs, his heart gave a staccato lurch, an anguished little leap of the love he had so foolishly borne.

Hours, days, possibly years later, it was Annatar's voice contorting through his mind as the first arrow squelched into him. _I had hoped you would not make me do this to you._ But it was far, far too late; too late to do anything but allow _fëa_ to unspool from bone and heartbeat.


End file.
